I recently browsed through projects proposed by the 60+ participants of the program’s Learning Lab, which is just one aspect of the program that aims to speed media innovation in newsrooms. What I like most about these projects is that they provide concepts that any media organization can use. Some of the ideas could be easily implemented using the resources media organizations already have.

By Susan Jedrzejewski, McColl Center for Visual Art McColl Center for Visual Art is pleased to welcome the arrival of its newest Knight Artist-in-Residence, Susan Lee-Chun from Miami, Florida. Lee-Chun begins her residency on September 6, 2011 along with six other residents from across the country. Fascinated with the power...

By Neal Hecker, GableStage It was a typical rain soaked afternoon, summer in Miami, as I stood, drying out in the empty theatre space at GableStage that would soon be transformed into a “mythical” Louisiana Bayou, courtesy of the imagination of Tarell Alvin McCraney. McCraney is a product of Miami,...

There’s a fascinating little exhibition on view right now at the University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Museum of Design: “Beyond Peacocks & Paisleys: Handcrafted textiles of India and its Neighbors.” The pieces in the gallery — a mix of manufactured and artisanal products, intended variously for commercial, household and sacred use...

By Sebastián Spreng, Visual Artist and Classical Music Writer Five years after Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s untimely death at 52, Harmonia Mundi releases a magnificent tribute to the lamented American mezzo-soprano. On two generous CDs, it’s a remarkable compilation of several recordings the singer made between 1989-1995 under conductor Nicholas McGegan...

By Sebastián Spreng, Visual Artist and Classical Music Writer For the Miami ensemble’s second CD, Patrick Dupré Quigley, Seraphic Fire’s founder and artistic director, could have picked a “lighter,” easier work. Instead, he accepted the challenge of Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem. Many will be surprised that this somber masterpiece comes...

Inside the 6th Street Container — a Knight Art Challenge finalist — in Little Havana is a little room. In fact, the Container, while elongated and appearing like a shipping container, is really a funky gallery with an alleyway entry. The exhibit...

Excessive bureaucratic delays have kept many Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from being fulfilled in a timely manner, making our government less open than it should be, the New York Times said in an editorial this week, citing the work of the Knight-funded National Security Archive.

The editorial’s title, “What’s Secret About World War II,” refers to the oldest unfulfilled FOIA request on record: Filed in 1991, the request asks for documents about atomic energy negotiations between the US and its allies at the close of World War II. And as we previously noted, eight different federal agencies have pending requests over a decade old.

You can expect to see a lot of me as I work with the communications team in its efforts to increase its digital outreach. As part of my new role, I will be blogging, tweeting and producing other social media content. I'll also be spending quite a bit of my time listening and responding to you, our community, and reaching out beyond our existing network to help keep fresh new ideas coming into our organization.

Upon researching Dublin artist Mark Garry for this article, I was comforted to find that I am not the only individual who had a difficult time defining his work. The artist uses his gentle and delicate sculptures skillfully placed around Detroit’s Cave gallery to make viewers consider how to navigate...

MN Idea Open, an innovative contest that solicits solutions to state problems from the general public, has opened its second round. This year, the issue is water quality and the Open has selected three finalists from more than 100 entries.

This Friday, Sept. 2, Fourth Wall Arts will be hosting its 15th Salon from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There are a wide array of artists and performers making an appearance at this Salon event. From poets and sculptors to music, dance and magic tricks,...

The report, released by the Center for International Media Assistance, stresses there is no one successful model that all independent media organizations should emulate. Instead, each news organization should take their customers and their environment into account to create sustainable business models.

Carolina Actors Studio Theatre (CAST) is all about creating an experience that extends beyond the stage. Because of this, I am sharing my personal experience with “AUGUST: Osage County” this past Friday, Aug. 26. I knew Carolina Actors Studio Theatre received a “Cultural Innovation" grant from the Arts & Science...

It's that time of year again, when the creative minds and open arms at Inkub8 unlock their doors for Miami-based artists during the 2011- 2012 Inkub8r Open-Studio Series. This year, like every year, the incubator series accepts applications from performance-based artists and filmmakers whose work is hybrid, experimental, sound, physical(theatre)...

Arts television kicks up a notch this October as PBS launches its nine-part PBS Arts Fall Festival. Sponsored by Knight Foundation, the Fall Festival explores the art scenes in the Blue Ridge Mountain, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. Look for full-length performances, artist...

Five local artists will be chosen to live and work in subsidized studios in downtown Miami, in the second year of the LegalArt Residency program, a Knight Arts grantee. The only thing is, the deadline to get in on this unique...

By Adrienne G. Whaley, The African American Museum in Philadelphia “Monie in the middle! Where she at? She’s at AAMP!” Okay, you caught us – in any other circumstance, that last line would be “In the middle!” but the week in question, Monie Love actually was at AAMP, the African...

By Meranda Stuart, Matrix Theatre For the past few weeks, Matrix Theatre’s puppet department has focused on the fundraising, production and performance of its original show: Marshland Security. Marshland Security focuses on the current landscape of Detroit and features local Detroit teens. The story follows Dante the frog and his...

Poynter’s News University, a Knight-funded program that provides affordable journalism-related training for writers, editors, bloggers and students, has nearly 200,000 registered users. To celebrate, it's sharing the stories of users and offering prizes, including an Apple iPad, for the best ones.

A previous contest winner, school newspaper advisor and English teacher Elisabeth McMullin wrote, “I was surfing the Web and trying to find some help when a high school newspaper advisors resource site pointed to NewsU. You were the answer to a desperate prayer from a desperate advisor! Everything I saw was excellent and easy to understand.”

One of this year’s contestants, Drew Selman of the St. Louis Photojournalism Project, explained the importance of NewsU for their project. “Their practical classes along with courses that cover more in-depth topics keep my photographers well armed to gather truly great stories,” he said.

Once again, Seraphic Fire has set the world of iTunes on its ear, climbing up into the top 10 on the Apple music service’s classical charts earlier this month with its newest disc, just as it did last year with its record of the...

"We just wanted to make recycling cool," says Matthew Naimi, director of operations at Recycle Here! "Artists and musicians make people come back." Recycle Here! was started in 2005 and now functions as the city of Detroit’s recycling program. Since then, it has recycled more than 4,400,000 pounds of material...

By Suzette Espinosa, Adrienne Arsht Center This month, 100 AileyCamp Miami campers, all middle school students from Miami-Dade County, took to the John S. and James L. Knight Concert Hall stage at the Adrienne Arsht Center for a grand finale performance that reflected personal and artistic growth the young group...

By Vera Wilson, President & Founder Astral Artists The Knight Foundation’s first and most generous grant for Astral’s Spiritual Voyages Festival on February 18, 2012 has brought our excitement and creativity to a new level. Conceived as a one-day, three-concert festival celebrating the musical and poetic expression of African-, Asian-,...

Starting Nov. 2, the newspaper I once edited, the Oakland Tribune, will be officially dead, its remains combined with several other papers under the name East Bay Tribune. This may make Oakland the largest city in the United States without a daily newspaper all its own. But what does that mean?

As the managing editor in 1991 of the Tribune owned by Bob and Nancy Maynard, I ran a newsroom with 130 full-time professional journalists. Attrition over the decades has left today’s Tribune with just a dozen reporters. That’s less than 10 percent of the staff we had. As the FCC’s Steve Waldman reports in Information Needs of Communities, the biggest impact of this shrinkage is a shortage in something called “local accountability journalism.”

Here’s just one example of why journalism matters and what Oakland has really lost:

Twenty years ago, 10,000 people fled for their lives when a 2,000-degree inferno raged over three square miles in the city, killing 25 people and gutting more than 3,000 homes – the most destructive wildfire in state history. During the first week

Frankford Avenue’s Bookspace offers exactly what it says: books and space. Opened originally as a book warehouse with around 100,000 books, Bookspace sold online until 2008, when it opened its doors to the public. Since then, its taken the warehouse and slowly transformed it into a cultural and performance venue...

Tech enthusiasts and local hackers in Nairobi, Kenya are building educational tools to help community users shape and learn more about Ushahidi's .ke Evaluation findings. The launch is part of a nine-month look into the impact of the organization's projects in Kenya since addressing post-election corruption almost four years ago.

Knight Foundation held a very successful Community Engagement Workshop in Akron this week.

Drawing on his book, For the Love of Cities, and the Knight Foundation’s ground-breaking research project, the Soul of the Community, author Peter Kageyama led over 200 people in an interactive workshop to help Akron develop ideas toward becoming more lovable community where people want to put down roots and build careers and lives.

Sept. 2 marks artist Romare Bearden’s 100th birthday, but Charlotte begins its celebration of this Mecklenburg County native tonight. Bearden is best known for textured collages depicting scenes of social customs in modern African-American society, often with inspirations stemming from his first home in North Carolina. “LOOKING FORWARD / LOOKING...

Universal broadband, stronger public media and government transparency are just three of the wide-ranging reforms required to make communities throughout the country more healthy, informed and democratic, according to the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities. The Knight Commission, which was made possible by a $1.7 million grant from the Knight Foundation in 2008, assembled 17 media, policy and community leaders to identify the changing information needs of communities and to suggest policies for enhancing the free flow of information and its uses.

The Knight Commission recognized that communities flourish when their residents are well-informed, have an abundance of local news available, and have the skills and tools needed for enacting change. However, the era of digital media has greatly altered the quantity, quality and accessibility of news and information. Americans have access to more information than ever before, but...

Summer is almost over, but the arts are eternal. Even though the kids are going back to school and hurricane Irene is packing up and shimmying up the coast, the performing arts scene in Miami is still chugging along with an array of events for everyone. [caption id="attachment_23089" align="aligncenter" width="590"...

The findings – though bittersweet – compliment a 2009 investigation that found that traditional media support for open government lawsuits in their states had fallen dramatically. They also give new meaning to Knight’s FOI fund, which helps state groups pursue open-government litigation by covering up-front costs such as court fees, if attorneys are willing to take on a pro-bono basis cases that otherwise would go unfiled.

“If ordinary citizens are becoming more aware of their access rights, and more assertive regarding them, it is indeed a reason to be gratified,” saidKenneth F. Bunting, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition. “However, if news organizations are trending toward being less gung-ho...

When the Minnesota Museum of American Art (MMAA) announced early in 2009 it would close up shop indefinitely and move out of its downtown St. Paul gallery space, it wasn’t much of a surprise. There’d been rumbles: turbulence in the leadership, money woes, ineffective management, the loss of its space...

O, Miami, Miami's first monthlong poetry festival, made national news last month as New York Magazine included the Knight Arts grantee in its weekly approval matrix. Agustina Woodgate's O, Miami poetry bombing project is prominently placed at the corner of highbrow & brilliant in the July 11, 2011 issue.

Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens (PMG), if you’ve been familiar with the city for any amount of time, is quite possibly something you’ve been clued into, if for no other reason than its age and magnitude. You may have only heard about it, or you have passed it while strolling on South...

On July 18, National Endowment of the Arts chairman Rocco Landesman experienced a Random Act of Culture® firsthand while speaking at the Chautauqua Ampitheater. The Chautauqua Opera Company surprised Landesman mid-speech with music by Puccini to illustrate his point about local, live art events. Enjoy the video above.

With "Manifest Destiny (there was blood on the saddle)," the Hinterlands, a Detroit-based physical theater troupe, is redefining the medium. The two-hour show was one of the most imaginative performances I have ever seen. The vaudevillian comedy, sing-alongs, pseudo-history, puppetry, feats of strength and skill, dreamlike imagery and the smell...

Supporting the arts just got much easier, as the Arts & Science Council launches power2give.org. Supported by Knight Foundation with a $250,000 grant, power2give.org is a website offering a unique way to match cultural fans and funders to local projects. Think Kickstarter for the arts. 501(c)3 organizations and artists will...

By Jessie Raynor, Akron Area Arts Alliance Director Summit Artspace visitors can view their city through artistic eyes at Streetscapes, Akron in Plein Air, an exhibition of paintings and photography inspired by our urban landscape. Curated by designer and plein air artist Brian Shellito, the show features works done in...

The Evening Muse is a small concert hall in the historic NoDa neighborhood. For 10 years, it has been one of the best places to hear singer/songwriter music in Charlotte. That was one of the motivations owner Joe Kuhlmann cited when asked, "Why The Evening Muse?" It’s about artistic development...

Knight Arts' Random Acts of Culture™ is at 379 performances and counting. As the program moves into its second year and nears its goal of 1,000 performances in three years, Knight Foundation Vice President/Arts and Random Acts of Culture™ founder Dennis Scholl shares the concept & the reactions with Plum...

School's starting up again around here, and for those with kids at home, I bet a fair number of kitchen-table conversations are underway about extra-curricular activities, like what to take on, how much to pay for them and where to find the right fit for each kid's inclinations? Given the...

I always thought art was simple. The artist paints, sculpts, photographs, writes, even dances around a faux fire made of papier-mâché flames while a projector projects bumble bees around a gallery space, and that's that. Voila, art. We, the viewers and art critics, admire and/or admonish the work, and then...

It’s Juneteenth Weekend at the African American Museum in Philadelphia and the community has come out to celebrate! Ned Hector, a Revolutionary War soldier with a musket slung over his shoulder, stands in the museum lobby, engaging families with stories of his life and war service in the late 1700s....

Last March, the "New York Times" lamented in a commentary from David Pogue the demise of the sounds of the analog age. That scratching of a record as the needle leaves the vinyl, signaling the end of an album; the fast forward/rewind...

Looking ahead again to the coming season, the Miami Bach Society will have an impressive gathering of early music performers paying us a visit. A visit or two, if you’re talking about Jordi Savall (pictured above), the Catalan master of the viol who came...

By Janet Batet, Arts Journalist The Farside Gallery, a quiet blue house located in the suburban Westchester area, far away from trendy art districts, offers the propitious environment for the intriguing artworks of the Cuban-born Miami-based artist Ana Albertina Delgado. The show is a survey on Ana’s drawings production from...

“Music is supposed to wash away the dust of everyday life.” — Art Blakey Orchestral music is powerful, magical and transformative. It is as relevant today as in distant lands and times past. Charlotte...

In "Rise of the Basement Dweller" at the 323East gallery, legendary Detroit graffiti artist Fel3000ft shows a much more conceptually sophisticated and politically charged side. The paintings on canvas share some similarity to his street murals: bright colors, round-shaped figures and an air of comical jest. Still, he confronts some...

This weekend, Aug. 20 and 21 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Walnut Street Dock, there will be a flotilla journey and performances on the Schuylkill River as part of The Miss Rockaway Armada’s “Let Me Tell You About a Dream I Had.” [caption id="attachment_22684" align="aligncenter" width="599" caption="The Miss...

Short films are magical. They are complete worlds unto themselves, but they are also windows into larger universes. On Saturday, Aug. 27 at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), a Knight Arts grantee, opens its doors to these short wonders when it presents its annual...

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the oceans support more than 50 percent of all life on Earth and cover more than 70 percent of the planet. The oceans are a big deal. In “If You’re Going to Pull A Knife, USAlo,” a theatrical collaboration between Carlos...

By Holly Zinner, Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art On Saturday, August 13, over 200 people came to the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art to celebrate Mississippi Women Artists at the museum's Wine, Women & Song event. The Museum hosted 11 female artists from the great State of Mississippi who gave demonstrations of...

Knight is excited about the merger of Good and Jumo, announced today. The combined organizations have the potential to complement one another in terms of content and online engagement. We believe that GOOD’s content will strengthen Jumo’s online engagement platform, and help bring together more people working toward social change.

In just a short time, Jumo has amassed a community of activists and 15,000 non-profits and NGOs - many in communities where Knight invests. The Jumo team brings a deep understanding of emerging technologies and online social engagement. In its fifth year of operation, GOOD brings together more than 3 million people each month through its socially-driven content and web platform.

This is also a collaboration of teams led by two visionaries in the social sector. Over the past five years, Ben Goldhirsh has grown GOOD from a quarterly magazine to a thriving content platform and agency business. Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder, founded Jumo in early 2010. Since then, the Jumo platform has helped over a million people find and connect with non-profits in their communities and around the world.

Knight Foundation initially funded Jumo through our Technology for Engagement initiative because we saw it as a unique way to use social media to help people take action. Now, we look forward to seeing how Jumo and Good will work together to connect socially engaged people with a community of like-minded individuals, a network of mission-driven organizations, and most importantly, meaningful opportunities to get involved.

One of the things I love best about my job is that, years and years into covering the arts beat around here, I still regularly get the delightful surprise of stumbling onto new-to-me cultural enclaves. For example, I’ve long favored the arts-friendly Black Dog Coffee and Wine Bar for lunch...

There is an unmistakable quality that often emerges from exhibitions of Cuban artists; serious, intellectual, with a mastery of craft that can be missing from those educated in looser educational systems. Such is the case with the excellent solo show that just...

Creed Black, editor and newspaper publisher and the former president of Knight Foundation, has passed away. He was a courageous journalist who will be remembered at Knight Foundation as a leader, in the field of intercollegiate athletics as a visionary and in our hearts as a great friend.

Philadelphia has a phenomenon — some may say epidemic — of electronic music sweeping the city. From Studio 34 on 45th and Baltimore Avenue, blips and beeps can be heard echoing at street level before even glimpsing the psychedelic blast of pixels inside. For anyone familiar with the 8-bit scene,...

With Detroit under the national spotlight as a hub for creativity, many people are chomping at the bit to see what the buzz is all about. As Forward Arts rounded out its first year as an organization, it added Art Ride to its repertoire of projects that use art to...

By Colby Damon, BalletX dancer It is always interesting to reflect on a piece recently performed after some time away from daily mental insertion into it’s unique combination of elements. Though it has been three weeks since the Ballet X company members and I performed Roger Jeffrey’s A Soliloquy Among...

The Mint Museum may have a shiny new uptown location in the Levine Center for the Arts campus on South Tryon Street, but the original Mint Museum on Randolph Road has not been forgotten. Yesterday was a monumental testimony to that with the unveiling of the new Tetsunori Kawana ikebana...

This site contains a dozen video stories, each of which documents an individual’s struggle to increase information access and civic engagement in his or her community. The videos, compiled by Professor Shane and his colleague Liv Gjestvang, feature a diverse group of speakers from all over the country who champion a large range of causes. In one video, a community organizer describes her decades-long battle to bring media attention to asbestos-related disease in her town; in another, the Executive Director of Native Public Media discusses the importance of bringing universal broadband access to the Native American community. Taken together, the videos demonstrate the importance—and power—of local information, whether...

There’s a gem of a park, tucked into a neighborhood that stretches westward from downtown St. Paul and which is bounded by the city’s Cathedral Hill area, Interstate-94 and University Avenue. Western Park is a vestige...

"We the people are fat. So much so medical experts have declared an epidemic and declared costs to this nation of untold billions. But there’s an even bigger epidemic out there, less obvious but no less dangerous. Just as we consume comfort food, our high-calorie midnight ice creams, we are, more and more, consuming 'comfort news.' "

Comfort News is politics, entertainment or other kinds of news that is more opinion than fact. It tastes great but isn't really that good for you -- or for society.

The piece is based on a speech I gave earlier this year at the University of Nebraska.

A comment I made yesterday ("Print could be the new vinyl") at the Asian American Journalists Association conference in Detroit stirred up a good bit of chatter on Twitter. I suppose it's only appropriate that after I touted the value of Twitter as a new storytelling platform, I saw its limitations up-close. Twitter worked to collect some interesting and funny reactions, some of them collected by Julie Moos. But I need more than 140 characters to flesh out what I meant.

The metaphor came to made during a "lighting round" that Richard Liu threw at us at the end of our panel on journalism sustainability models. Richard asked each of us to give a thumbs up or down on the trajectory of different media topics: UGC, Twitter, broadcast and print. Here is some of what was on my mind when Richard asked for a + or - on print:

Earlier that morning I'd noticed Kyle Kim's tweet touting his examination of the Detroit newspapers' printing "scale back" nearly 2-and-a-half years later. The tweet prompted me to pick up the AAJA's print publication on the way to the panel. As I did so, I realized how rarely I pick up physical newspapers.

I was also thinking about Longshot Magazine, the Knight-Batten Award winning experiment in publication started by Mat Honan, Alexis Madrigal and Sarah Rich. (I'm patiently awaiting the arrival of my print copy of Issue 2- Debt.) Every few months, Longshot volunteers "create a magazine start to finish in the space of 48 hours."

Lastly, earlier in the week I had a conversation about an exciting web-to-print venture. It may not come to pass, and if does it may not work -- but keep your eyes on this space for a possible experiment in that zone.

In the ensuing discussion, the notion of "newspapers for hipsters" took hold. Julie Moos asked, "So Newspapers are for hipsters?" in the title of her Storify summary of the "print as vinyl" discussion. Now I don't hate on Williamsburg (not any more than anyone else), but I think it's important to point out that records are not just for hipsters anymore. From their near-death at the hands of CDs, records have seen an increase in popularity in recent years. (In hip-hop, of course, vinyl never died; in punk the 7-inch has been vibrant since the early 90s, at least.) My local chain record store, not a hipster zone, sports posters touting vinyl in its windows. Records sales are up in the UK (55% in first half of 2011) and the US, according to USA Today:

Vinyl was the fastest-growing musical format in 2010, with 2.8 million units sold, the format's best year since SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991.

Albums possess a physicality against which digitial cannot compete. Bands like Radiohead and lables like Touch and Go have recognized that vinyl encourages exclusivity, maximizes design potential and creates a depth of involvement that 0s and 1s cannot. Vinyl's renaissance is not due to nostalgia -- it's due to the fact that musicians, labels and fans have built a creative and consumer experience based on what the format does well.

I don't want to beat this metaphor to death. Here's the core of the comparison: as more and more of the content we consume is based on bits, the ability to engage with atom-based media will, for some, gain value.

Now it's time for me to go off and buy that turntable my wife's been pining for.

Photo: Code for Oakland was a one day workshop for people interested in using Oakland and Alameda County, CA data to build mobile apps for the 2011 Knight/FCC Apps for Communities Competition.

By Ellen Satterwhite, FCC Consumer Policy Advisor

The FCC and the Knight Foundation have partnered up for a competition to build apps to make cities more livable! As developers and communities’ use the last few weeks of summers to finish their entries for the Apps for Communities Challenge, it’s time to announce the impressive panel of judges who will be reviewing and scoring those entries. We are honored to have investors, technologist, civic leaders, entrepreneurs, and philanthropist who have agreed to server as judges for the competition; which ends August 31. Without further ado, the judges are:

Marc Andreessen is a noted investor in information technology. He previously developed the web browser Mosaic and co-founded the company Netscape; he is an investor in numerous technology startups including Digg and Twitter; and he serves on the boards of Facebook, eBay and Hewlett-Packard (among others).

DonorsChoose.org is a website that allows people to donate directly to specific projects in schools and classrooms. It was started in 2000 by Charles Best, when he was a teacher at a public high school in the Bronx. Since then, it has grown to serve all the public schools throughout the United States. As of August 2010, more than $55 million dollars had been donated to over 138,000 projects, helping more than 3,400,000 students in need.

Mayor Booker has a history of organizing and social justice work. His parents successfully fought against racial discrimination and shattered corporate ceilings, inspiring him to pursue a life of breaking barriers and working for change. On May 9, 2006, Cory Booker was elected Mayor of Newark, with a landslide victory.

Brad Feld has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur for over twenty years. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group—which focuses on investing in early-stage IT companies—he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures, a company that helped launch and operate software companies. Brad currently serves on the board of directors of several companies for Foundry Group. In addition to his investing efforts, Brad has been active with several non-profit organizations and currently is chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

Tom Lee is the Director of Sunlight Labs; prior to assuming leadership of the labs, he managed Sunlight's Subsidyscope project, an effort to explore the level of federal involvement in various sectors of the economy. His writing on technical policy has appeared in the American Prospect, Techdirt, Progressive Fix, and various impassioned Slashdot threads.

Jennifer Pahlka is the Founder, Executive Director and Board Chair of Code for America, and has spent the past 15 years in the company of the technology elite. She spent eight years at CMP Media where she led the Game Group, overseeing GDC, Game Developer magazine, and Gamasutra.com; there she also launched the Independent Games Festival and served as Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association. Recently, she ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events for TechWeb, in conjunction with O’Reilly Media, and co-chaired the successful Web 2.0 Expo.

The Bakehouse Art Complex has been doing a good job lately of staying on the art map, with new shows and lectures and events — appropriate timing as it is the nonprofit Bakehouse Art Complex's 25th anniversary. The...

"Stone Soup" is an exhibition of varied tastes at Work Detroit, a gallery in Midtown Detroit facilitated and operated by the University of Michigan School of Art & Design. "Stone Soup" is a folk story about a group of strangers that convince a town to cook with them a feast...

It’s hard to imagine today’s opera companies without the music of Giacomo Puccini, and indeed it’s likely that many an opera company might not be here today were it not for the box-office reliability of the Italian composer’s work. Puccini’s...

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA) has an upcoming documentary photography show entitled "Displaced." Two photographers are showcased in this exhibition: Noah Addis and Bohyun Yoon. The opening will be on Thursday, Aug. 25 from 5 to 7 p.m. and will also feature a reception and talks by the...

Some may still think Charlotteans have limited options when it comes to music, but one just has to dig a little deeper. In a city our size, with all its funky cultural pockets, we do have a wide variety of live musical offerings. Recess Fest #3 gives the Queen City...

I wanted to do something different last weekend, so I did. I ventured out to Tango Ocho, a traditional Milonga, or tango event, that was once banned by the military government in Argentina. Held every Friday night on the second floor of a nondescript building, Tango Ocho thrives in a...

Cross posted from fiusm.com, student media at Florida International University By: Heather Armas, contributing writer Starting in August, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum will open its virtual museum doors. The vision for the Virtual Frost project was a collaborative effort between Dr. Carol Damian, director and chief curator...

The 132-page report, produced by the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard, details major changes at the initiative's 12 participating programs. The schools have added master's degrees to teach deeper "knowledge-based journalism," in science, arts, business and other specialties. At the same time, they've rewritten curriculum to eliminate print and broadcast "silos" and embrace the multimedia digital future of news. And they've launched ambitious online news organizations, from Neon Tommy at the University of Southern California to the New York World at Columbia. "The Carnegie-Knight Initiative," writes Shorenstein director Alex Jones, "should be...

The following blog about the importance of arts criticism is crossposted from Art Works, the official blog of the National Endowment for the Arts:

By Abraham Ritchie

Abraham Ritchie. Photo by Anna Wolak

Like a ship heading towards open ocean, progressive art is constantly moving away from us. Culture does not slow down or stop when visual art is cut from school curricula or when art critics are fired from major newspapers. Rather it is the community that suffers, as the public becomes distanced from its own culture. Unaware of the innovations that are going on and why, the community can become alienated from art. The artists can also suffer, though they are still fundamentally connected to culture in ways that the public is not. Without critics, artists can pursue unproductive or backwards paths.

The art critic is crucial to both the public and to artists. The art critic must connect new art to the public, providing a platform for understanding and appreciation. Logically, the critic must also give critical feedback to the artists who are focused on innovation in their work. This allows the artist to improve their practice or reject the critic’s assessment. Rather than invalidating the critic’s point, this will build complexity into the conception of an artwork. After all, once a point has been made it cannot be forgotten, though it can be ignored.

Increasingly, however, mainstream art criticism is merely being used as a public relations outlet for the arts industry. This is the real danger to art and to culture; that it is used as a tourist attraction rather than understood as meaningful culture. This is damaging to artists and the public alike as both are given a superficial understanding of culture. Artists are...

Working-class neighborhoods don’t wear their art on their sleeves, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have culture. In fact, you’ll find some of the most ambitious artists go about their business in just such unlovely communities. Cheap rent allows creative people freedom from worrying so much about the bottom line....

In Kenya, small-scale farmers use iCow, a mobile and Web information service that runs on Ushahidi’s Crowdmap platform, to send text messages about agricultural resources across the three largest networks in the country. The Ushahidi-based system takes the crowdsourced information and plots the locations on a map, helping farmers in rural areas find what they need to support their livelihood.

In Indonesia, Waspada allows people to use cell phones and the Internet to map crimes in Jarkata on a minute-to-minute basis. The project also...

Knightblog is publishing excerpts in two parts. The first is here. The second follows:

Michelle Foster: There have been attempts at hybrid commercial/donor-funded news outlets; how sustainable is this approach? Can these media “graduate” to self-sustainability?

Eric Newton: No model is automatically better or worse than any other...In the United States in recent years, there has been a proliferation of nonprofit digital news sites, such as the Texas Tribune, MinnPost and the Bay Citizen. These work in media rich environments where there are commercial media ready to pay in partnerships for news, and where the community is ready to donate. In other parts of the United States, citizen journalism models seem to work better where there is no existing media and where there is a tradition of volunteerism. In the U.S., there’s a new emphasis on collaboration and news sharing between former competitors because of the 15,000 journalists who were downsized since the recession…The only real mistake these days is to not try something new.

Artist Alette Simmons-Jimenez is surrounded by her work on a light, open second-floor studio space in Wynwood this Thursday afternoon; of particular interest is a series of collage paintings, partially crafted from flower petals coated in resin....

We recently completed an assessment of the early Knight News Challenge winners (2007 and 2008), taking a closer look at the outcomes they’ve achieved in their targeted communities, their challenges, progress and influence on the field of media and journalism. We’ve displayed the report highlights in an infographic and a SlideShare presentation that we built in partnership with the design firm Kiss Me I’m Polish.

Certain key insights and lessons stood out for us.

Here are four things we noticed about successful media innovation projects:

1.Knowing Your Niche – Projects that stayed close to their community, and adapted with it, found success in unexpected places. A good example of this is Freedom Fone, a two-way, phone-based information service (e.g. audio menus, SMS and voice messages), which discovered a niche by working with community radio stations in Africa that had been denied broadcasting licenses. A growing number of stations have used Freedom Fone’s VoIP technology to enable them to continue to reach their audiences (and now often with added interactivity).

2. Building Community – Whether it had a fancy design or promised the next whiz bang tool, projects’ success hinged on how well they engaged their users. For example, EveryBlock didn’t gain significant traction until...

71 POP, the most recent addition to Detroit’s' Sugar Hill Arts District, gives emerging artists and designers a unique way to showcase and sell their work. The retail space and online store plans to work with 71 artists/designers over the next two years, providing them with free marketing and consulting,...

Sunlight Foundation has released a new app that will help people make informed decisions about healthcare services and prescription drug options. The project is the first in a series of Knight-funded apps developed by Sunlight to help make public information more available and actionable for citizens, and supports Knight's commitment to promoting informed and engaged communities.

Sunlight Health works by presenting data in three simplified categories: healthcare facilities, suppliers and prescription drugs. Once users have downloaded the app, which is available for free in Apple’s iTunes store or in Google’s Android Market, they can use their cell phones to search for the most up-to-date information about hospitals, nursing homes, dialysis clinics...

By Sebastián Spreng, Visual Artist and Classical Music Writer Erwin Schrott. His name is German, though his looks suggest a cocky “compadrito” from the Rio de la Plata (River Plate). The young Montevideo-born baritone is one of the undisputed stars of today’s opera scene. To show his versatility, Schrott has...

As you may know, Bridgette Mayer Gallery is in the process of renovating its gallery space at 709 Walnut St. With the influx of new galleries and collectives and the renewal of tried-and-true locations like Bridgette Mayer, it’s hard to deny that Philadelphia’s creative scene is experiencing a renaissance. Bridgette...

It is no secret that the news industry is struggling in the midst of our digital revolution. But what exactly is happening? How are these changes affecting our communities? And what should be done to make sure that people are getting the information they need? This summer, four different reports that address these questions have been released (a fifth, by the New America Foundation, will be out shortly). These reports come from different sources—a British weekly news magazine, the U.S. government, an educational institution, and a non-profit—so they bring different perspectives and ideas to the table. But many themes, like the need for innovation and collaboration, recur. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I will discuss the content of these reports, as well as their strengths and weaknesses.

The Economist series, published July 7, includes social media, how media is faring in different countries, WikiLeaks and other media “newcomers,” among other articles. One of the highlights of the series comes from an article about impartiality, where, in a show of refreshing forthrightness, the Economist describes Fox News as “offer[ing] distinctively right-wing opinion and commentary,” and says that “MSNBC…has lately been positioning itself to appeal to a left-wing crowd.” Maybe because the Economist is a British magazine, it seems to be more straightforward about news slant than many American journalists. Overall, the Economist piece provides pretty thorough coverage of the problems facing modern media, but is short on solutions. Their coverage of “philanthrojournalism,” is particularly feeble: a suggestion is put forth that foundations should fully endow non-profit journalism, which a lot of foundation leaders worry would actually undermine the connection between the news organization and the community that it serves (for more on this topic, see this blog post about the four “C”s of community media).

The closing reception on Friday, Aug. 19 marks the end of another round of artists in residence at the McColl Center for Visual Art, a Knight Arts grantee. In 11 years, The Center played host to more than 250 different artists, representing some of the best contemporary artists regionally, nationally...

There’s irony to great design: The better the innovation, the faster it becomes unremarkable. This is especially true of design leaps that improve on the form and function of things we use every day — easy-to-turn can openers, bagless vacuum cleaners and kitchen utensils that feel good in your hand....

In Academy Award-wining director Errol Morris's latest documentary film, "Tabloid," which opens this Friday, Aug. 12 at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, he brings to life the fascinating true story of the wildly eccentric, deliciously bizarre and most likely delusional character of Joyce McKinney — the main character in the...

Dancer Silas Riener is currently on tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Legacy Tour, a Knight Arts granteee. Today he checks in with his second (of several) reports from the field. By Silas Riener, Merce Cunningham Dance Company It's a last year of lasts for the Merce Cunningham Dance...

The new and expanded Miami Art Museum just took a great leap forward. The museum has announced it will welcome Tobias Ostrander as its Chief Curator and first Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs next month. Ostrander, a visual arts curator with nearly two decades of experience at some of the...

In the middle of Primary Projects irregularly angled space, a giant mastodon-like creature arises from its pre-historic muck, so heavy that the platform underneath it is starting to buckle and collapse. The statue — structure, really — is menacing, but...

A partnership with a local public radio station, WHYY, enabled The Notebook's editor, Paul Socolar, to hire a fourth reporter for the site in July. On the new reporter's third day on the job, he was asked to take a look at a large data file that had been sitting unexamined for a couple of months because no one had time to look at it.

By day's end, the site broke the story that a "total of 89 schools — 28 in Philadelphia — had been flagged by the...

It’s amazing to think Hostel Detroit, the city’s first hostel in 15 years, has only been open since April. The busy home-away-from-home for adventurous international, national and regional travelers on a budget has already become a potent symbol of Detroit’s entrepreneurial, welcoming spirit and its strong sense of community. The...

The dictionary defines fecund as producing or capable of producing an abundance of offspring or new growth; fertile. For John W. Love, Jr., FECUND is an interdisciplinary art project. This new work is also the recent recipient of the prestigious McColl Award in the very first year individual artists were...

Foreign Policy magazine highlightsBasetrack, a 2010 Knight News Challenge winner and social media reporting project that accompanied the First Battalion, Eighth Marines for the first five months of their deployment in Afghanistan. The piece gives unique insight into life in war with a photo-essay of images taken with an iPhone.

“It is by no means a comprehensive look at 10 years of war, but it is an evocative and profound slice of life -- at the beginning of the end of the longest conflict in U.S. history,” writes Foreign Policy.

Basetrack builds on project director Teru Kuwayama’s nine years of experience working as a freelance journalist in Afghanistan. Kuwayama wanted to counteract the problem many journalists had in presenting in-depth content because of their short embed periods by ...

A new gallery downtown is filling a very important niche, and they have some great work on display right now. Prelude Gallery, near 20th and Pine, is a showcase for current students and recent graduates — many of whom were referred by their teachers. There are a wide array of...

What four qualities does a media business model need to succeed? In this interview, Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at Knight Foundation, explains the four “C”s of Community Media and the new skills...

Sometimes the best things in life come late, and they usually happen at Inkub8. And sometimes they include a potluck dinner afterward. Get your dancing shoes on and head over to Inkub8 today (yes, today) at 1 p.m. for an invigorating workshop with Lazaro Godoy, the extraordinary multidisciplinary Tel Aviv-based...

Arts education at the White House welcomes a new voice this month as Knight Foundation's national art advisory council member Aaron Dworkin is named a Champion of Change in Arts Education. Dworkin, the founder and president of the Detroit-based Sphinx Organization and President Obama's first nominee to the National Council...

By Val Renner, Akron Civic Theatre This has been a busy season for the Akron Civic Theatre. With the support of Knight Foundation, the Theatre hosted 51 events between Sept 26, 2010 and May 28, 2011. Here's a snapshot of the season: 51 total events 48,410 attendees 35 rental events...

By Jean-Marie Allion, Lead Writer for Home Water Did you ever witness an argument between two cooks about what goes into an “authentic” jambalaya? The truth of the matter is… almost anything goes! What makes a jambalaya a jambalaya is the final bouquet resulting from a unique mix of flavors,...

By Rick Shiomi, MU Performing Arts My east coast book tour for the new anthology Asian American Plays for a New Generation, published by Temple University Press, began in Philadelphia. I landed on Sunday, July 24th in NYC and caught the Greyhound Express bus to Philadelphia, where I went directly...

When the fellow pictured here on the right, dean Gary Kebbel, ema em iled me about the Economist series on the news industry, I asked him what he thought of it. This is our usual sequence of doing things. Gary, now dean of the University of Nebraska college of journalism and mass communications, was the journalism program director at Knight Foundation as we started the media innovation initiative (now a regular part of our work). I was VP of Journalism, and got in the habit of hearing him out. True to form, he replied with more than a tweet. So below is what a new American journalism dean says in reaction to this major series. My comments follow, and I’ll my own review of the series in a future post.

Writes Gary Kebbel: For its readers who are asking what's going on with online media, the Economist articles are useful. I think the main benefit of the package is to point out that we've been here before - before 1833, that is. Media did well before and after the rise of mass media. Journalism used to be more local. It used to seek citizen contributions. (I still remember reading one of the newspapers hung in the National Press Club that asks readers to come to the riverboat as it pulls in to their city and tell their stories to the reporter on board.)

Link Media, which broadcasts documentaries, global news, world music, international cinema and more on its Link TV satellite channel in the U.S., is expanding its news video offerings with the launch of Link News. Link has long been a provider of international news reporting. During the recent uprisings in Egypt, it provided extensive coverage thanks to feeds from Al Jazeera English and Mosaic, its Knight-sponsored, Peabody Award-winning daily news program on the Middle East and North Africa. But with the launch of Link News, the site’s powerful new search tools will bring an even greater variety of stories from all over the web, which will be available to users worldwide for free.

With support from Knight Foundation, Link Media developed semantic search technology for its news video platform. This technology, based on Link’s ViewChange.org, analyzes the transcripts and descriptions of the videos and produces multiple topic keywords. These topics are then used to find related videos and articles from all over the web. The search also...

In the last hour on Twitter, I’ve read that artist William Powhida’s New York show is a dud, and that Hugo Weaving’s performance as the Red Skull is a high point in Captain America. These weren’t opinions from published critics; rather, they were from regular Twitter users with an enthusiasm for art and pop culture. Readers of my generation, the Millennials, are more likely to want to see a movie or play because their friends like it than because a critic does. We’re more likely to discover art through our Facebook and Twitter feeds, and to take the suggestions of Netflix and Pandora than to discover new things on our own.

It might seem, then, that Millennials have no appetite for arts journalism, but that’s not the case: Younger readers want to read and share stories more than ever. They just want to have a say in what’s being read and shared. They want to be the critics. So where do arts journalists fit in?

In recent years, I’ve noticed a marked uptick in arts programming that places public engagement at its center. It's more than audience outreach (although that’s part of it). The kind of community programs I’m talking about go far beyond the goal of awareness to full interactivity, where the public not...

This past Friday PhilaMOCA — The Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art (it’s located in an old showroom for tombstones) — hosted a dual event, which was part documentary video, part rock show, but all around awesome and informative. To kick off the night, there was...

There’s a small art and design show on view at the Detroit Creative Corridor Center’s new Accelerator Studio gallery that’s well worth a look. Featuring the work of five local artists, “Detroit: Creative Concept” commemorates the July 12 grand opening of the studio/gallery space, which is located in the College...

How are new technologies affecting communities and the way we participate in and govern a democracy in the 21st century? That’s the topic of FOCAS, a forum taking place this week in Colorado as part of the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program and supported by Knight Foundation.

By concentrating on networks and citizenship, this year’s Forum on Communications and Society (FOCAS) will explore how citizens will access and engage with civic information in the era of connectivity. Questions about the different roles individuals play as “citizens” and “users” in their off- and online worlds will...

Music is a universal language, and African-American music packs a rich heritage with numerous styles and traditions. On Q Performing Arts, Inc. may be about the minority experience, but it’s for all people. It was so good to see the audience at its season three preview reflected this. Although the...

St. Paul is home to the largest youth circus arts school in America. Who knew? In the realm of kids’ activities, Circus Juventas is a far cry from piano lessons and Little League. It’s just so much more fabulous. The school, which has been packed to the gills with area...

If you love Cirque du Soleil as I do, you will enjoy the edgier and more aggressive "Cirque Éloize iD," which opened last Tuesday night at the Adrienne Arsht Center, but don't expect the same quality of storytelling you would from Cirque du Soleil. [caption id="attachment_21494" align="aligncenter" width="598" caption=" Jumping...

Our Mission

Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged.